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Sandra Olsen is director of the UB Art Galleries.
"The Wall: Reshaping Contemporary Chinese Art," the most ambitious exhibition of contemporary Chinese art to travel beyond China, just ended its run in the UB Art Galleries and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. It was quite a coup to bring this exhibition to Buffalo. What was it like mounting such an impressive and important exhibition? What was it like collaborating with the Chinese?
The project was initiated by a former UB faculty member Gao Minglu, who came to my office in June 2001 with an exhibition proposal that clearly presented a unique opportunity for UB and Western New York. The representative slides of artwork were irresistible because of the diversity of art forms and artists; work by mature artists now familiar to a global audience because of their representation in large international exhibitions, as well as work by very young, new artists whose work has never been shown outside their local communities, let alone outside China. Generous support from the Interdisciplinary Research and Creative Activities Fund from UB's Office of the Vice President for Research enabled Professor Gao to complete more than six months of research, including making studio visits throughout different regions of China. This research and curatorial approach differs dramatically from recent exhibitions of Chinese contemporary art, which focused on experimental gallery spaces and the exhibition system in China. Videotaped interviews and extensive photographs taken during these studio visits established the foundation for the 450-page bilingual catalog publication, which is the definitive scholarly resource for contemporary Chinese art. Professor Gao's original proposal included the request that we collaborate with a Chinese art museum in order to expose the museum to Western professional standards. The China Millennium Monument Museum was a worthy partner in this endeavor and I believe learning took place in both cultures. Like all worthy projects of this scale, it was made possible by the combined of efforts of professional and support staff from the three collaborating institutions and financial assistance from diverse resources. Because it was the first time a museum in China worked directly with museums in the United States, all of us learned a great deal about the differences and similarities between our professional procedures. It was extremely interesting to learn, in some cases, why our procedures are different and to negotiate through them. This learning process was one of the reasons we decided to form the collaboration. An important final step will be the preparation and dissemination of an evaluation of the collaborative process.
You oversee two gallery spaces: the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts and the UB Anderson Gallery. How do you decide what exhibitions are presented in each gallery?
The two galleries serve different purposes, resulting in different exhibition programming, although occasionally, as is the case with "The Wall," we share the spaces to allow us to present large exhibitions. UB Art Gallery is a vital academic resource for the university and the community, presenting temporary exhibitions of contemporary art and offering interdisciplinary programs that examine current art practices. Our curator, Sandra Firmin, visits artists' studios locally and in different cities in the U.S. and Canada, as well as searches art journals and the Internet for artists who are doing exciting things with their artwork. UB Anderson Gallery, located in Buffalo's University Heights neighborhood, is the university's art museum and is responsible for the care, management, research and documentation of UB's permanent art collection and related archives, while making these resources accessible to the public. Exhibitions there relate to the collection, community or are the result of research done by UB students or faculty.
With a world-class gallery like the Albright-Knox right in our backyard, how do you bring art lovers out to the UB Art Galleries? How do you compete?
I find that we are not in competition with the Albright-Knox, but rather are partners, as our recent collaboration has shown. We serve our community in different ways, but with the same goal in mind: to bring quality exhibitions and programming to Buffalo. A difference between us is that at UB we are dedicated to providing a service to the university community with our programs and to creating opportunities for students and faculty to utilize our galleries and collection for their own academic research. Whenever possible, UB Art Galleries collaborates with UB academic departments to organize lectures, conferences and other events that provide opportunities for further examination and discussion of related issues. Some good examples are the "The Roles and Representations of Walls in the Reshaping of Chinese Modernity," an international research conference held in conjunction with "The Wall." This conference was organized in partnership with the Asian Studies Program; the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy; the College of Arts and Sciences; the Humanities Institute; the departments of Art, Art History and History; and the Julian Park Chair in Comparative Literature. We also partnered with the Baldy Center for a conference on "The Ownership and Repatriation of Cultural Heritage," held in 2004.
If you could select anyone, whose work would you most like to exhibit in the galleries?
At UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts, diverse funding support and the excellent work of our curator, Sandra Firmin, enables us to exhibit most artists of our choice. Well-researched and well-written exhibition proposals have raised substantial funds from outside the university to supplement the gallery's annual support from the Seymour Knox Endowment Fund. Large-scale and expensive exhibitions, such as "The Wall," are realized through collaboration with other institutions. That said, my "dream exhibition" would be the opportunity to host an artist/curator/scholar residency at UB Anderson Gallery. When David Anderson generously donated the gallery, much of his personal collection and the gallery's archives to UB, he also donated a house on adjacent property. It would be wonderful to have sufficient support to sponsor residencies for guest curators, artists, critics, etc., who would live in the house and spend a semester or academic year at UB utilizing UB's collection and/or artwork/objects from other regional museum, as resources for research, teaching and/or organizing an exhibition or conference of international significance.
What can we expect to see at the UB Art Galleries during the coming semester?
This semester at UB Art Gallery, we are hosting two large-scale installations by Kelly Kaczynski and Adam Cvijanovic. New York City-based artist Adam Cvijanovic will inaugurate the Lightwell Projects—an annual series of site-specific installations in UB Art Gallery's Lightwell Gallery—with a floor-to-ceiling painting of Niagara Falls reminiscent of 19th century panoramas in subject matter and scope. Chicago-based artist Kelly Kaczynski will debut her project, "Scene from 'Olympus Manger'," which features a life-size stage. A peek below the stage will reveal common building materials that coalesce into suggestions of expansive and enclosed landscapes. In addition, we are hosting an MFA exhibition and a selection of paintings by art department faculty member, David Schirm. In June, we'll open an exhibition of Cuban-American art organized with Jorge Gracia, Samuel P. Capen Chair and SUNY Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department for the NEH Summer Seminar and curated by Lynette Bosch, associate professor of art history at SUNY-Geneseo. At UB Anderson Gallery, we are working with art history students to research our collection. We'll be showing prints by Francisco Toledo and Karel Appel, as well as a selection of sculpture. In addition, we're hosting an exhibition of work from a class from the architecture department.
What question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
I would like an opportunity to share with your readers the other projects we are engaged in at UB Art Galleries. While exhibitions are our most visible activities, we also are conducting research and working toward making our collection more accessible. David Anderson gave us an extensive archive, which documents his and his mother Martha Jackson's gallery practices from the 1950s to the present. We are working to organize this material and rehouse it so that it will be available to students, faculty, scholars and those conducting research on any of the important artists Anderson and Jackson worked with during their careers. The archive has led us also to establish a Martha Jackson Oral History Project to learn more about Jackson and her importance in the art world. A team of volunteers has created a list of interviewees (her friends, family, artists and colleagues), while a professional consultant has prepared as a guide and procedure for conducting interviews. The information gleaned from the interviews will assist with the writing of a biography of Martha Jackson. In addition, we are in the process of reorganizing storage space and designing a Print Study Room that will provide direct access to and personal examination of prints in the collection.